The Congolese army announced that it had killed four rebels from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebellion and freed nine hostages during "combat patrols" carried out from September 4 to 6 to the east of the town of Biakato and along the Samboko and Ituri rivers.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Mak Hazukay, army spokesman in the area, two attackers were killed on Wednesday, September 4, and two others on Friday, September 6. Nine hostages were freed from the hands of the rebels, including "two Ugandans," said Lieutenant Colonel Mak Hazukay, spokesman for Sokola 1 operations.
Military effects and several items belonging to the attackers were recovered.
This is the first time that large-scale operations have been carried out by the coalition of Congolese and Ugandan armies in the Biakato and Samboko area. Villages where hundreds of civilian deaths have been reported by civil society over the past two years.
To successfully carry out these operations, the Congolese army is asking the population "to avoid going deep into the forest where the fighting is taking place" and to continue to accompany the two armies in order to prevent "the enemy from protecting the west of national roads number four and 44", adds Lieutenant Colonel Mak Hazukay.
YOUTH DISGUISING AS ADF
The FARDC dismantled a group of young people who used to disguise themselves as ADF rebels in the Mayuwano area, an entity located in the Mambasa territory on national road No. 44, Beni-Mambasa axis.
According to Colonel Truno, commander on this axis, it was during the military operations carried out on the night of Thursday 5 to Friday 6 September 2024.
"They disguise themselves as "fake ADF", they arrive in a village and fire bullets so that civilians leave and stay harvesting cocoa and looting shops," he said.
These arrested civilians are almost all young people from the community, including three women, all handed over to the specialist services for the opening of legal files.
The army claims to have recovered weapons and military effects during this tracking operation.
As a reminder, the "fake ADF" phenomenon had become, these days, recurrent in Mambasa and Beni in North Kivu where the active forces had several times alerted the specialized services, calling on them to get involved in dislodging the perpetrators who plunder cocoa in the region. In their media outings, they had even asked the specialized services to regulate the cocoa purchasing sector to try to overcome the problem of fake ADF.
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